It IS beautiful. Much better looking than the front right edge of my bathroom vanity. That’s the spot where I pinch the tube between the vanity and the handle of my toothbrush, and mash the toothpaste up toward the top.

I want a Steampunk toothpaste squeezer. All clockwork driven with a helical mainspring, a flyball speed governor and ruby bearings. Make it in Naval bronze with a lignum vitae base. Nothing else is good enough.

logistically, how does one actually use this? I can’t imagine picking up the whole contraption to get the proper angle, and is it heavy enough that it wont move if you just turn the key with it sitting on your sink?

I have a binder clip on my toothpaste. They used to make tubes out of metal. You could roll them up and they’d stay rolled up. Now they make them out of plastic. When you squeeze it, it unrolls and all the toothpaste shoots back down into the bottom of the tube.

Tom’s of Maine sells toothpaste in metal tubes; it works great with my monogrammed sterling silver toothpaste tube rolling key. Back when I was in art school (and on a very tight budged) I ordered one from Tiffany — at the time I think it was about $20 (with the monogram!). A very silly purchase, I admit, but I am still quite fond of it, and use it to this day.

Speaking as a machinist of 10+ years, I can tell you what you’re looking at there is (if they’re producing these things in any kind of quantity at all) maybe ten dollars worth of parts and assembly. Thirty to fifty dollars might be a reasonable price. Three-hundred dollars is what we in the industry would call a massive motherf**king rip-off. Of course maybe each piece was individually hand-crafted by some obscure sect of lathe-operating monks who lubricate their tools with rarest oils which must be carried out of the deepest South American jungles on foot, and then assembled in some arcane religious ceremony which can only be performed during a total lunar eclipse, but if that were the case I would imagine it probably would have replaced “chrome-plated” as the main selling point.